Social Media Consistency Instant gratification

Ever look at your social media account and tell yourself “My numbers are down. I’m just so annoyed with social media and I really just want to get feedback. I used to get X number of likes and now I don’t get that many!”? These were the words of one of my clients, who was very frustrated with social media.

 

Instant gratification 

As a society, we are obsessed with instant gratification. If we put something out there and want to get likes and comments instantly. The likes and comments are seen as an “indication” of how successful our content is. I really struggle with that because as someone who’s been in the social media world for a really long time, I believe that’s the wrong lens to look through social media with. When many entrepreneurs don’t get the expected number of likes or comments, they feel like their posts aren’t successful. I believe this is the wrong way to measure success on social media. Please keep the following points in mind:

1. People are smarter and realize that if they comment and engage on certain things, they’re going to get served at.

2. Consider the topic you are posting about and your ideal client. If you are somebody who is in a sensitive subject, like mindset coaching, your ideal client, more than likely won’t comment publicly on your content because other people can see that. Consider if your ideal client is somebody who is private or is it somebody who is more public? Those two factors are very important to determine whether people are actually engaging with your content. Oftentimes entrepreneurs forget that and feel like their content just isn’t working.

3. Is your ideal client on the platform you’re posting? A lot of times people will post on Instagram and do reels and more, yet their ideal client is 40 and up. Instagram is adding more users in that category, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be the first adopters of reels and that type of content.

I think those are three things to consider when you’re looking at measuring your social media success. However, there are some other things to consider with social media as well.

Four elements to consider when it comes to social media

Strategy

If you’re at a place where you’re just posting to post and there’s no client journey in mind, and no cohesion between the content that you’re posting and where you want your ideal client to end up, it’s not going to work. If there is no congruence between your posts, that’s not going to build trust. It’s not going to show value. It’s not going to take people on a journey from where they are to where they want to be. If you’re posting just to post, I highly recommend you take a two-week break and get strategic about your posting. The strategy comes across in the content that you’re putting out there and if you’re not strategic with your content, it is really difficult to have success with social media at all.

Social Media Consistency Instant gratification

Consistency in your offer and your audience

In my Business Ecosystem Builders Program, we really focus on the one signature program and an ancillary offer, because every time you make adjustments to your audience or to your offers you’re essentially hitting the reset button. I know that sounds really dramatic, but I think it’s something that is not mentioned enough. Every time you make a big adjustment to your audience, you must almost reintroduce the concept to your audience and then re-establish yourself as the expert. I’m not saying that you can’t do that in a way that it works, but ultimately you’re prolonging your own success every time you do that. The same thing applies if you’re making adjustments to your ideal client. That is 100% a reset button. You’re tapping that reset button and you’re starting from scratch again because the audience and the platform that you built are not consistent with who your ideal client is.

Encourage engagement

I don’t see people asking for engagement. There are very few calls to action on social media in general. Holding a contest to encourage growth or tag friends is a really great way to actually grow your audience. But I feel as though most people, maybe upwards of 95%, don’t do that. If they do it, they do it way over the top; there is just no middle ground.

Consistency and instant gratification

You need to have relentless consistency. Not just for three or six months. No, over the course of a year. You post 340 times out of 365 days. The more consistent you are, the more you’re going to change the trajectory of your business. This is strategic posting. It also needs to go hand in hand with nurturing your audience. So, what does that mean? Think of social media as one piece of the business ecosystem that you have to grow. It’s a bigger part of the marketing category.

If you’re doing social media make sure

  • you’re emailing your list
  • you’re working on getting guest spots on summits and podcasts
  • you’re asking for the sale and continuing to nurture and develop that relationship with that person

Ultimately, if you aren’t doing any of the above, don’t even bother doing social media. You need to have both in place and they need to work together to create success. Think of your social media like a magazine. You need to constantly create content for it and remember, as a magazine, you won’t get instant feedback on whether or not there was a good article in it.

 

Organic marketing is a long haul game

When you think about your marketing from social media, podcast, or YouTube, especially organic marketing, it is a long game. Think of it from the perspective of traffic. There is earned traffic, organic traffic, and paid traffic, and you should have some combination of the three to grow your ecosystem.

Social media is just one snippet of a bigger marketing strategy, and you can do social media until you’re blue in the face but if you don’t have other pieces in place, you’re never going to see an ROI from that social media.

  • You have to curate a collection of content that helps people get to where they want to be
  • You want to establish trust
  • You want it to be useful

Unfortunately, people forget that it takes on average eight touches for somebody to take action and not everybody’s going to see your every post.

 

Leverage social media without making you crazy

My advice: Get in and get out. Do your commenting, do your posting, and get out. If you can get one percent better each and every day, your audience will compound and grow over time. The first true 1,000 fans are the hardest to get and from there it will continue to grow and scale on its own.

If you’re looking to social media for that hit of dopamine that you can get with instant gratification, I would try to look elsewhere. Really try to think of it as your broadcast line or a magazine where you aren’t getting any feedback. Look at it through that lens and say: “I’m going to do this for the next 365 days and see where I’m and then make decisions from there.” When you zoom out and look at data and your growth over time, it’s much easier to determine whether you’re having success or not.

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